


up, up, and away

by Dreamitbeit



Category: The Maze Runner (Movies), The Maze Runner Series - All Media Types, The Maze Runner Series - James Dashner
Genre: Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Comic Book Science, M/M, SO, author refuses to apologize for superhero trope mashup, let tbs play a villain vibes, meaning the science that i decide is science, minewt 4 days, some blood and violence but its the comic book kind
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-02
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-14 15:09:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29793792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dreamitbeit/pseuds/Dreamitbeit
Summary: So, most of them live at the Tower and there are a few adjacent types, and every so often there are strange moments of utterly bizarre normalcy that Minho almost forgets about all the...everything.Sometimes at night Minho lies on the roof of the Tower and just watches the sky, and he thinks about if Newt has houseplants, or wears  a certain type of sock, or if he has a favorite flavor of ice cream.(Or; They're all human-adjacent, but they’re still people.)
Relationships: Minho/Newt (Maze Runner)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 9





	up, up, and away

**Author's Note:**

> This is basically the result of me procrastinating midterm studying with a superhero movie-marathon. please take this six hour one-shot as a offering.

Minho brushes stray gravel and dust off his shoulders, the tiny pieces of a building that he’d been thrown through clattering on the polished floor. 

Minho would say that a lot of things about The Tower are extraordinary, but the cleaning crew really takes the cake. 

Agnes’s lab two levels down is a marvel to futuristic technologies, but the tower had been blown up more times then Minho could count yet every intergalactic world ending catastrophe aside, Hank the floor polisher always managed to get the scratches out. 

Their Christmas bonuses better reflect it. 

They probably do, the Director is too smart a man to skimp on the lifeblood of any building. Minho’s commlink around his wrist beeps just as he steps out of the elevator. A single command of ‘Debrief” sent by the man himself. Minho sighs and remembers the days _before_ he’d joined the Collective, back when the world was simple and he was just some confused kid with the sudden ability to fly at supersonic speeds and punch through steel with his fist. 

Good times. 

His feet carry him through the tower’s halls, cape singed and swishing at his ankles. It’s still a bit weird, wearing a uniform designed by Agnes. It’s the classic cape-and-combat gear combo, kevlar skin tight pants and shirt in aggressive shades of dark blue and black. It’s still a bit weird being part of a team, actually. They’d come together because of the Director and they still had bumps in the road, but they’re figuring it out.

(Example: that thing with the whole underwater secret-base and the revelation that Fry’s childhood best friend Gally was secretly still alive and now is top of the Global Task Force for Augmented Individuals wanted list and...actually that’s just a _whole_ other thing that he doesn’t want to get into.) 

So, there’re still some kinks to work out. 

Alby and Thomas clash in a leadership capacity, Alby with his planning and thoughts and link to the ancestral plane that allows him the strength, speed, agility and knowledge of all his forebears combined, and Thomas, with his breakneck speed and snap-decision-making-habit. At least Fry is always there to ease the friction. (Which is ironic, because his whole thing is control of particles and causing them to create friction and heat and then blasting the energy in whatever direction he chooses.)

Minho stops in front of the clear glass door for the office that has ‘Director’ across the front in a plain black font like a harbinger of doom (seriously, if the letters had blood dripping down them they’d somehow look less threatening) and gives a single hollow knock. There’s the tiniest traces of lemon furniture polish in the air from the director’s wood desk. The door slides open with an automated hiss and Minho walks into the room to the familiar sight of Director Jorge sitting behind his desk and Brenda, his adoptive daughter that also happens to be a super spy, leaning against the wall with crossed arms and ankles. 

Minho manages to get the first word in. 

“So how much do you pay your custodial staff for a christmas bonus?” 

Director Jorge (first name only, like Cher, Minho says _never_ but thinks _often_ ) is one of the only people that never trips over Minho’s low playful sarcasm and ability to disarm with bland frank statements. 

“So,” Jorge’s dark grin pulls at the two long scars across his cheek that end at his ear. “You wanna tell me about what happened in San Francisco hermano?” His shoulder aches from where he’d broken his own fall with a semi-truck, and he’s pretty sure there’s still dust in his hair. 

Minho opens his mouth to defend himself because _hey_ he did a pretty alright job, all things considered, but Jorge taps something on his desk and a holoscreen appears, rolling through ammature footage from the battle. It’s all shaky phone camera work and dust and screaming, but Minho watches himself get thrown through a building with a grin because even getting thrown through a _building_ he looks cool. The un-sub that he’d been fighting appears on-screen by floating down from above. Some mad scientist with a bone to pick with human rights and a fancy propulsion jet pack made out of indestructible metal that packed a lot of missiles. 

All in a day's work. 

As the version of himself on screen stirs weakly from the rubble, Minho feels a small tingle of excitement in his stomach because any second now-

The feed cut out into loud static, visuals _and_ audio. 

Minho blinks. 

Jorge leans forward on his elbows and looks at him expectantly, as cold and calculating as the ultra-modern decor of his office. “You wanna tell me why all the video footage from the battle was somehow _magically_ erased, and all I have to go off of is first-hand accounts of a blue suited individual that can conjure things with his hands stepping in to prop you back up and help you mop up the mess?” His voice rises but he never shouts, and Minho wonders what terrifying thing on this planet (or another, the whole ‘space is full’ revelation is just...a whole other story) could possibly make Director Jorge lose his cool. 

“Did he bridal-carry you out of the rubble?” Brenda adds in her throaty voice with a smirk. Minho would tell her to go jump off the roof, but A, she’d probably be fine, and B, Minho is impervious to most weapons known in the galaxy, but he wouldn’t put it past her to find the one that could finish him off. 

“Listen,” Minho starts with an easy shrug that twinges his shoulder. “It’s taken care of. The guy’s in a supermax enhanced holding facility and everybody went home happy. Why look a gift horse in the mouth?” 

Jorge’s unimpressed expression tells Minho that he is most definitely going to look a gift horse in the mouth. “My _problem_ is that some hippy-tree-loving _ecoterrorist_ with a neat little trick of ripping dimensions open and making monsters out of the matter,” He stands, leaning forward with palms flat on the desk. “Had to come to the rescue of the Defender **,** the man who saved the world more times than I can count on my fingers.” 

Minho nods. It’s accurate. A solid ten world saves, if you’re including the assists. “How’d you lose your pinky finger anyway Jorge?” Minho asks, mostly only because he’s bullet proof and therefore marginally safe. There are skeletons in closets and then there are _graveyards_ and Jorge is definitely the latter. You might get a surprise if you went digging. 

“You know,” Brenda says while producing a knife from _somewhere_ on her skin-tight combat suit (and yeah, okay, Agnes is definitely being biased with the tech outfit design) and starts to clean her nail beds with the dagger. “If your little magic pal wants to be part of the team so much, he could just come in for an interview.” She smirks. “He’d have to stop blowing up oil refineries though. Not that I don’t admire his work, there’s just a little bit more red tape on our side.” 

Minho shrugs again and stalls any daydreams before they could happen. “Well that’s not something that he’s going to agree to anytime soon...so…” He thumbs over his shoulder towards the door. “We done here? I’ve gotta go shower half of the Bay off of me.” 

Jorge snorts and waves him out without another word. 

The Tower feels quiet despite it being noon on a Tuesday, his footsteps echoing off the polished walls and sleek modern light fixtures. As Minho walks the halls towards the elevator that would take him to the dorm levels his eye catches the now-iconic photo of the Collective’s first big victory together. 

All of them standing on a pile of rubble, Minho, cape billowing (and looking absolutely _fantastic_ , even with the blood on his face), Thomas beside him mid-exhausted, relieved laugh. Fry with a soot covered grin. Brenda and Alby in the background, too used to working in the shadows to ever think of taking the spotlight, and Teresa at the very front in her metal suit, faceplate removed and smirking a victorious smirk. 

So, it’s a lot. 

The Collective. 

It’s a lot of origin stories and tests of merit and moral compass guiding moments where people found their cause, their mantra, their reason for good. Often tragic, always inspirational, definitely dramatic and a little self-important. 

(Not that Minho doesn’t have a healthy level of self-importance. It’s basically Olympian levels of healthy.) 

It’s just like...a lot. And Minho’s already heard them all, so. 

Minho, on the other hand, grew up in a happy childhood with two loving parents that happened to both be genius quantum-physicists, and that maybe accidentally ripped open some kind of space-time-gamma-thingy. Coincidentally at the exact moment of the blast, sixteen year old Minho had been upstairs in the kitchen making a sandwich. 

Radioactive gamma-ray power manifestation, oldest story in the book. 

But Minho’s never had a big moral-compass guiding moment, because he sort of breaks the mold in the fact that both of his parents are happily alive and that the minute his whole ‘powers thing’ happened they took him to a _excellent_ adolescence psychologist that helped him re-adjust in a boringly healthy way. 

“Minho!” 

Minho turns slowly on his heels. Thomas runs down the long polished hallway towards him (at _normal_ speed for once) with a big grin and a smug twinkle in his eyes. “Is it true?” 

Minho sighs. 

“Is what true?” 

Thomas’s grin gets, if possible, wider. He’s in his suit, a plain black combat-Kevlar-spandex-nanotech-shirt-and-pants number, complete with sneakers that can take the friction of Thomas’s superspeed, and not for the first time Minho wants to point out that Agnes has clearly been picking favorites in the gear designing department. 

“Oh come on,” Thomas practically vibrates. “You got _saved_ in San Francisco man.”

Minho considers just taking off and smashing through the concrete ceiling. It’d be like walking through tissue paper if he put in a little effort. “So,” Thomas’s grin gets wider, smugger. With the freckles and the jawline he’s every bit the all-American boy-hero that the world adores. “Is it true? Did you guys team-up against the portal-demon? Did he bridal carry you out of harm's way?” 

“It wasn’t a ‘portal demon’. Just some nutjob with a PhD in engineering and a bone to pick with human rights.” 

For a second Thomas’s face hardens. “Did you get them?” 

“On their way to the Depths Facility right now.” 

Thomas’s face brightens again in an instant. “Awesome. So,” He wiggles his eyebrows. “Did you get to talk in between all that ‘saving the city’ stuff?” 

Minho sighs, staring in Thomas’s earnest face and sending a silent apology to Hank the floor polisher. He hears Thomas’s shout of exasperation and exclamation of “ _Dude_!” under the crunch of the ceiling as he flies right through it. 

-

“He flew through the ceiling!” Thomas squawks indigently ten minutes later in Teresa’s ultra-tech lab. Blue see-through screens all around offset the sterile white gleam of machinery.

She’s tinkering with something that looks like a palm propulsion system, hair tied back and lab coat on. Her metal suit exists in a constant state of reconstruction and update, and her lab was always the first place anyone looked when they needed her. Thomas likes to sit beside her on a stool and spin in a slow circle as he watches her work, because that way he can bother her. He never actually stops moving, (a side effect of being able to outrun bullets) and as a result between his constant movement and Teresa’s near stillness they can combine to make some semi-balance of a regular best-friendship. 

“Well,” Teresa says mildly as she pokes at wires with delicate long silver tools. “You know what Minho’s like about Newt.” 

-

Two days later Minho is midway through toasting a poptart when the tower alarm blares at a deafening decibel. 

“Minho!” Alby sprints past the open concept kitchen. “Suit up and meet at the jet in five! Your boyfriend is back!” 

Minho smiles before he can help himself. 

The toaster dings and his poptart jumps up.

-

As Fry buckles into his seat next to him in the jet with a satisfying snap he looks at Minho. “You’re bringing a poptart to the fight?” 

Minho talks around the pastry hanging between his teeth. “Well I wasn’t going to leave it.” 

-

“ _Stop pulling your punches_!” Teresa shouts at him over the intercom as she screams past him in her suit, propulsion engines on her feet and palms blasting her forward towards the tornado of rubble hanging hundreds of feet above the shipyard. 

The shipyard that’s currently being ripped apart by shadowy demonic figures shaped like wolves that glow a faint wispy sinister purple and can tear steel with their massive jaws. 

So, yeah.

On top of a crane that’s being used to build ships, Minho and Newt are holding hands. 

Well. 

Holding hands, in a _sense_. 

“Aw,” Newt grinds out, locked in a stalemate of fists with Minho, _visibly_ straining under all the combined strength Minho can muster, yet still managing to smile playfully with grit teeth. “Is mummy a bit cross with you?” His eyes flash purple and Minho only has a second to brace for the impact before energy just _slams_ against him, an unimaginable amount of force that sends him flying off the skyscraper crane. Minho feels himself be thrown like a rag doll, whipping through the sky in a sickening over-under with the wind whistling through his ears until he manages to right himself mid-air, the world still spinning. 

He hovers for a second, shaking his head and trying to reorient himself. Down below he can _just_ catch the blur of Thomas on the ground, zipping from shadow creature to shadow creature, a zig-zag of light and speed that most eyes can’t even hope to pick up. 

“Minho! Go right!” Fry calls from the ground, and Minho has just enough time to dodge the giant winged bat-wolf- _thing_ that Newt’s conjured up lunging for him as Fry vaporizes it with a blast of heat so close that it singes Minho’s cape. 

“Dude! Watch the hair man!” 

Alby swears over the headpiece. “ _You and your hai-Thomas! Over to the west! See if you can find a way to draw them away from the docks! Brenda and I’ll cover! If those things get in the city_ -” 

“He’s not going to send them into the city, that’s not his game.” Minho snaps, rocketing back towards Newt on top of the crane, who’s doing a complex series of hand movements with glowing fingers that spells bad news for _all_ of them. 

Hurting people isn’t Newt’s game, not at all. You could even say that Newt’s game is an honorable one, even if he’s going about it _kind of_ the wrong way. You know, the whole ‘Opening up a portal to some different reality where he can conjure weird dimension monsters to fight global warming but would also probably involve a lot of violent explosions and huge amounts of property damage’ kinda game. So. 

Yeah. 

It’s like, a _whole_ other thing. 

Minho flies forward, slamming into Newt and sending the both of them tumbling down through the sky towards the muddy bank. The clouds overhead are black and purple, the giant magic tornado is spinning faster and starting to glow, metal is shrieking as it tears off ship hulls, shadow monsters from a different dimension roar and scream, chaos reigns, and Newt drops towards the ground like a stone with Minho rocketing after him. 

But Newt doesn’t seem scared, not at all. Minho files that fact away for further study just as he catches Newt around the wrist.

Hanging mid-air and panting, Minho’s hold on Newt’s arm tightens and he manages to wheeze out, “You ever think about maybe just leaving this kind of thing up to the environmentalists that fight for this stuff legally? Maybe start a recycling program in your neighbourhood?” 

“No.” Newt flashes him a charming smile to match his charming accent. “Because the planet doesn’t have time mate, and this way gets results.” His eyes burn purple. 

Minho sighs. 

-

“So…” Fry starts when they all stomp back tiredly into the jet, the portal successfully destroyed, Newt successfully escaping, the shipping yard not-so-successfully-saved, and the group of them mud splashed, scratched and banged up. Whatever. Better for the environment anyway. Fry eyes him with loving suspicion. “What’s the deal with you and Newt man? You’ve got some serious banter.” 

In the pilot’s seat Teresa flicks absent switches to prepare for take-off and doesn’t even pretend like she’s not eavesdropping. Thomas is stretching and eating an apple while Brenda and Alby talk on the comms to Director Jorge and Assistant Director Paige as she coordinates with first responders and the media. 

Minho rolls his eyes, acting a lot more nonchalant then he actually feels when he laces his hands behind his head as a makeshift pillow. “There’s no ‘deal’. He conjures inter-dimensional creepy crawlers to do his dirty work and we stop him, end of story.” 

It’s not really the end of the story, because every time the alarm sounds back at the tower there’s a tiny jump of electricity in Minho’s veins, a spark of excitement because it might be Newt, might be his magic and his darkness and his anti-hero agenda. 

-

The next time they’re fighting Newt pauses right in the middle of it to grin playfully at Minho while pinning him. “How do you get your hair to do that? It always looks perfect, even when you’re fighting.” 

Minho’s so shocked he doesn’t even fight back, just blinks up at Newt and lets himself be pinned for a moment. 

(That’s the reason he tells himself anyway. He has a healthy sense of self importance, but maybe not so much in the self awareness department.)

-

Not all of them live at the Tower. Alby lives off-campus somewhere, and he’s _so_ secretive about his life outside of the Collective that Minho didn’t even really _notice_ he was being secretive for an embarrassing number of years. He’s gotta have a place somewhere in the city, because he’s only ever five minutes away. Although, Minho’s pretty sure that guy can run like forty miles a hour. 

He’s probably got a secret alter ego. With like, a dog and a partner and they make lame stir-fries on certain days of the week. 

Agnes doesn’t technically live at the Tower, she’s got a mansion in silicon valley that’s been rebuilt twice now thanks to various explosions and mishaps of a superhero nature, but more and more Teresa seems to be re-basing herself her at the Tower, and sometimes Minho wonders if it has anything to do with the fact that she’s obviously in love with Brenda. 

She’s not doe-eyed or blushing about it. You wouldn’t even know it was love from the look of it, but that’s what it is. 

Brenda loves her back.

They both know this. 

They’ve both, apparently, made the conscious decision not to take it any farther than acceptance. Because they live _kinda_ complicated lives and Minho gets it, gets the quiet joy from just being able to be _vulnerable_ with someone, to know that they’ve always, _always_ got your back. 

(Or they’re doing it like crazy behind everyone’s back and just _insanely_ good at hiding it from a group of individuals that combined made up the sensory ability of half the planet.)

So. 

Brenda lives at the tower, Teresa’s kidding herself into saying she doesn’t _technically_ live at the tower, and Thomas lives at the tower. He keeps saying it’s temporary, that he’s going to find a place, but Minho’s not holding his breath. 

Fry did for a while, but he’s in one of his moved out stages. He drifts in for a month and then back out for two, and Minho has no illusions as to where he’s going. If the Director knows about Fry’s search to find his long-lost-best-friend-turned-adversary-but-sometimes-still-bestie, Jorge doesn’t seem to mind. Probably wants to _recruit_ Gally. 

Minho’s not sure how Gally got involved in the life, be it aliens or magic or science or ancient rituals or some strange combination of the four, but more power to the guy, except for when he’s aiming those laser eye things at Minho. They _sting_. 

So, most of them live in the Tower on at least a partial basis. 

Sometimes other people pop in. There’s a constantly rotating roster of a _very_ small _very_ tight knit community that deals with the fate of the world on a daily global scale, and as a result, you get to know the people involved in a sort of weird adjacent way. 

In the way that, Minho could go home for Christmas and sit at the dinner table to fold dumplings with his mom, and then look up at the news playing on the tiny kitchen tv and see that there’s footage of a guy stopping a rogue nuclear warhead from going off, and realize she’s a friend of a friend. 

(Harriet and Teresa go way back, apparently.) 

So, most of them live at the tower and there are a few adjacent types, and every so often there are strange moments of utterly bizarre _normalcy_ that Minho almost forgets about all the...everything. 

Like when Teresa wears fuzzy socks or Brenda mentions her kiwi allergy or when Minho catches Fry flossing in the bathroom. 

Sometimes at night Minho lies on the roof of the Tower and just watches the sky, and he thinks about if Newt has houseplants, or wears a certain type of sock, or if he has a favorite flavor of ice cream. 

They’re all human-adjacent, but they’re still people. 

-

The time after that they’re actually _not_ fighting, not at all. Minho and the Collective are busy having their asses handed to them in London by some group of alien-technology-wielding rascals that are fighting for some sacred-stream or some bullshit. 

Minho’s not sure, this hadn’t really been his thing. 

Brenda and Alby only comm’d him and the others in for a little extra muscle. 

But it had kinda devolved. 

“ _Fuck_!” Thomas shouts over the uplink. 

Minho swings his head around to look through the battle that's raging over five solid blocks of London to see what’s got him cursing. Thomas is in a square, scrambling to his feet next to a blasted scorch mark as somebody with a giant glowing-space-cannon thing takes aim, a high-pitched whine spitting out of the weapon. 

Minho doesn’t think, just _flies_ , and _fast_ , the way he only can when panic grips his heart and his body becomes able to do extraordinary things. (And Minho’s baseline is pretty extraordinary, so,). He moves so fast his vision blurs, landing in front of Thomas with a millisecond to spare, covering his body with his own. The debris that would’ve torn through Thomas’s flesh bounce off Minho’s without any harm. The heat of the blast feels _burning_ on his skin, and Minho adjusts his hand to try and cover more of Thomas’s face, because he’d look weird as fuck without eyebrows. 

He’s a good friend. 

Half a second later there’s a _boom_ of the sound barrier being broken and Teresa comes flying in, shooting at the cannon guy and spinning loop-de-loops and generally doing crazy acrobatic shit that shouldn’t be possible in that complete metal suit that she treats like an exoskeleton. 

“ _Get the robot_!” Teresa shouts, blasters firing in every direction. 

Minho jumps to his feet. “The _what_?” 

“It’s a robot.” Thomas pants, clapping his palm on Minho’s shoulder in a gestured thanks for the tight save. “It’s some weird energy cult robot or something. There’s a weird crystal or a weird temple I don’t fucking-” A explosion goes off nearby and they both brace and cover behind a burnt out car. “Know.” Thomas finishes. 

A second later when the dust clears Brenda flips over the vehicle to land on her feet like a cat between Minho and Thomas, soot-stained and dusty but otherwise unscathed.

She’s the only team member in the field without any kind of augmentation or enhancement, be it radioactive or otherwise, but she always seemed to come out with only a few scratches. “Hey guys? Taking a breather?” 

“It’s a robot?” Minho asks, partially bored and partially freaking the fuck out. 

“It’s a suit like Teresa’s.” Brenda clarifies. “But it’s getting its power from some kind of possessed crystal from space. They kept calling it ‘Azulith’. We can take it though. This isn’t a Hail-Mary situation.”

“ _Of course it isn’t_.” Fry sighs over the comms in clear disagreement. 

Alby chimes in. “ _It packs a hell of a punch so keep it at a distance. It’s fast but clumsy, the suit is a hackjob of Agnes’s, I think.”_

There’s a scream in the distance, civilian and afraid. Thomas's face instantly hardens. “Gotta go!” He disappears in a blur, and Minho flies Brenda over to Fry so they can take on the remaining followers of the weird cult-robot-possesed-stone...whatever. 

The bad guys with the guns. 

The moment he drops Brenda off there’s a metal screech from above and Minho’s rocketing upwards, trying to get to the mechanical death match of Teresa versus evil-robot-lith, because it really doesn’t look like it’s going Teresa’s way. Minho makes it just in time, grabbing the thing and ripping it from Teresa midair, and she falls towards the earth with shaky emergency landing movements, the propulsions on her feet and palms sparking and fizzling with misfires. 

Minho slams his fist into the robot-Azulith-thing that’s powered by a possessed space crystal or whatever, and instantly decides this tactic of just trying to pummel it into goo is a mistake. 

Because Azulith is _fast and fucking strong_ , and it uses the momentum of being punched to spin around and hit Minho with a right hook so hard it would turn a mountain to dust. Minho counters, but even though he’s one of the strongest of the Collective, (please, who’s he kidding, _the_ strongest) this weird fucking robot that’s trying to…wait-

Minho catches one of the robot’s fists in his hand with a sound like a giant tree branch hitting a church bell for a momentary struggle-of-strength stalemate. “So, wait,” Minho pants. “Why exactly do you want to blow up the London subway?” 

The robot’s voice is futuristic metallic and ancient molding all at once. The sound of it raises every hair on the back of Minho’s neck. “ _I will destroy the underground tunnels to create the perfect pathways for channeling the earth's core heat to-”_

The robot is suddenly surrounded by strange purple wisping smoke, and then it’s _gone_ , flung from Minho’s grasp and being absolutely _slammed_ into the side of a building in a cloud of dust and concrete.

Minho’s supercharged heart skips a beat like it had done the first time he’d figured out flying. 

“You know,” Newt’s smirking at him, and he can _fly_ now apparently, he must’ve been practicing his weird cosmic space-time manipulation or whatever. His palms are facing down and glowing purple, the same as the bottom of his shoes. “I’m just slightly annoyed at how _bad a job_ you and your friends are doing. I mean _I’m_ having to step in here. How’s that for a wake up call?” 

“I like your new outfit.” Minho says dryly, because he does. Newt’s floating there in all of his strange smokey gamma-ray glory, and he’s wearing converse, skinny jeans, and a stylish sweater. He’s suddenly not _Newt the Bewildering_ , he’s some cute mid-twenties hipster that pays too much for coffee. 

It’s honestly pretty disorienting. 

“Well,” Newt smirks. “You’ve caught me on my day off.” He nods in the direction of the robot...thing, now rocketing back towards them. “Are you and your little merry-band going to take care of that? Or shall I?” 

“ _Put up or shut up witch_!” Brenda shouts over the comms. There’s a grunt in the background and a scream of pain, definitely not Brenda’s, and then the sound of an alien weapon shrilly powering up. “ _Alright_ ,” She pants. “ _If you guys can draw the walking toaster this way I think I can hit the crystal with this thing once it powers up fully. These weapons seem to run on the same stuff, I bet they cancel each other out if we hit them hard enough against each other_. _Agnes I need your big-tech-brain._ ” 

“ _On my way_.” Teresa’s busted suit comm cracks out statically. “ _We can talk about your clear lack of respect for the scientific process once all of this is over_.” 

“ _Your windup toy need some new parts there Agnes_? _It’s sounding a little fuzzy_.” 

“ _Guys_!” Alby groans.

Minho turns to Newt and flashes a grin. The spark of excitement in his stomach catches into something bigger when Newt smirks back at him while they float miles above the city. 

“So,” Minho asks, “How good were you at tag as a kid?” 

“Never played, but I get the general concept.” 

Minho takes off towards Brenda miles below them on the street, Newt just as fast and right on his heels. 

And flying is _usually_ pretty awesome. 

But today, as him and Newt duck and dive and soar up, up, and _away_ through the clouds with some weird fucking robot-monster-what-the-fuck-ever fast on their heels?

Today flying is pretty fucking awesome.

-

Thomas slides to a stop in a cloud of dust with sparks throwing off the heels of his anti-friction shoes that Teresa whipped up for him, spinning the child down on the ground that he’d just saved from an explosion in a tenth of a second. The kid’s mother bursts into tears, hugging her daughter and then him and then her daughter again. The little girl, complete with (slightly singed) pigtails and a missing tooth looks over Thomas’s shoulder and gasps, pointing into the air with wonder. “Mommy look! It’s Defender and The Bewilderer! They’re fighting the robot together!” 

Thomas’s mouth falls open and his head snaps up towards the sky. “It’s who and _who_?” 

-

Three days after the attack on the city Minho’s still in London helping with the cleanup. 

It’s backbreaking, even for him, and the Director’s called him back twice now. He's the last of the Collective still there. 

Alby and Thomas had finally packed up this morning, and yesterday Teresa and Brenda and Fry had been summoned back for something else. And Jorge had actually _called_ him today instead of just sending a message, so Minho knows the jig is up and he’s got to head back as well. He’d fly back tonight, it’d just either be by his own will or in the jet. 

He’d put it off for as long as he could, and even Minho’s starting to realize that it’s getting pathetic. So after helping shift debris for the better part of the day, he goes and sits down at the duck pond in Buckingham Palace Gardens. The water is still a bit dusty but otherwise undamaged, green-blue and with healthy algae floating in places. With his back facing the park and his casual clothes of a dust covered t-shirt and jeans, he’s almost indiscernible from the huge group of volunteers working to help clear the city. 

Only he can carry heavier stuff. 

The ducks quack at him but the other people in the park leave him alone. It’d be nice if the ducks left him alone too, but they’re tame enough that they think he’s there to feed them. They crowd below his hanging feet, honking and squawking in annoyance at perceived withheld treats. 

Minho holds open his hands to demonstrate the emptiness. “No bread guys, I’ve got nothin’.”

“Y’know,” 

Minho hadn’t really been expecting an answer so he starts, jumping to his feet and turning in a millisecond. Then freezing when he realizes who it is. “Oh.”

Newt smiles, shugs with his hands in the pockets of his jeans. It’s odd seeing him in jeans two times in a row. It solidifies the _other_ Newt, this _new_ Newt. “Bread’s bad for ducks.” _New_ Newt says. 

For a moment neither of them move and the swell of the park fills the silence. Children laughing, heavy machinery of the cleanup crew, the hustle and bustle of London streets. Then Newt's eyes flash a playful purple and Minho braces for impact, but Newt just sits down next to where Minho had been and looks up expectantly. On autopilot Minho follows, letting his legs hang over the edge again. 

“Thanks for sticking around.” 

Minh shrugs. “Thanks for helping us beat that thing.” 

Newt reaches into his pocket and pulls out a packet of birdseed, offering it to Minho. “It wasn’t so much as I was helping you as I was helping myself. I was worried about my favorite coffee shop.” 

Minho huffs out a laugh, tossing a small handful of seed on top of the water. The ripples they cause are instantly erased by the ducks, happy quacking and wings flapping. “You’ve gotten a lot better at that stuff.” 

Newt’s smile flashes wider, happier. The sunlight has his hair all lit up, has the green of the park bringing out the dark brown of Newt’s eyes. It’s a _truly_ sunny summer day in London, and it feels like a strange surprise gift tied up with a bow. His own swallow sounds loud in his ears. 

“How’d you,” Minho holds up his own fingers and wiggles them. “You know. Magic.”

Newt lets out a hum, staring down at the ducks with an absent smile. “I got lost in a time loop in the nineteenth century and trained with a witch for two hundred years.” 

“ _What_.” 

Minho forgets his control for a second and throws the birdseed too hard. They hit the water like bullets and make the ducks flap their wings and quack reproachfully. It makes Newt laugh, a bright clear sound. 

(It’s also possibly the best sound that Minho’s ever heard.) 

“Yeah.” Newt nods. “Wrong place wrong time. Or the right place, I dunno. But yeah. I picked up a thing or two.” He lifts his hand and flicks his fingers in a very calculated graceful way, and tiny deep purple tendrils start to wrap around his digits and down his wrist. He shoots Minho through the chest with a sly smile. “I know it _seems_ like magic, and it _has_ magic names, but it's actually just science. Two hundred years ago if you put a three-D screen in front of someone, _they_ would’ve thought it was magic.” He clenches his fist and the purple smokey vapours evaporate. “Magic is just science that we can’t understand yet, that’s all it’s ever been.” 

Minho swallows the dryness in his throat. “So, wait. When’d you…” He waves to the world around them.

“About eight years ago.” Newt says easily. “I walked into the woods near my village to check my snares for rabbits and walked out in a shopping center carpark.” 

“You don’t talk like someone from the nineteenth century.” 

“Magic.” Newt offers dryly, like that explains everything. Maybe it does, and Minho just doesn’t understand it. At least three times a day Teresa says sentences that sound like literal gibberish but have Thomas nodding along. 

Minho looks down at his and Newt’s rippling mirror images in the water. They could be college students sharing a beer between classes from appearance alone. He imagines it just for a second before pulling himself back. “So, just, you're in the woods, then you're in a time-loop thing with a witch?”

Newt shrugs easily. “Just a big weird coincidence-hey, funny story. Fry? The guy that helped develop the treatment that gave him powers? He was researching the witch I was with. Odd, isn’t it?” 

“Do you _really_ think it’s a coincidence?” Minho deadpans, because he’s seen enough of the world to know that when it comes to glowing shit there’s _no_ such thing as coincidence. 

“Not really.” Newt snorts back. “But it’s a nice dream.” 

An easy silence falls over them and when Minho gets up the courage to look over, Newt’s smiling down at the ducks serenely. And then Minho frowns as a thought occurs to him. He looks left, and then right, and then back at Newt. “How are you here right now?”

“Um, I’ve been wanting to talk to you about potential head injuries anywa-”

“No, I know. ‘Time loop witch’ or whatever, I mean _here_ -here. In this park. You’re an international terrorist. How’s no one called the cops?” 

Newt laughs again, that same happy-bright bark that makes Minho want to fly. “This is London mate. You could walk down the street on _fire_ and no one would say a word.” 

“Two months ago you conjured a thirty foot tall shadow demon and destroyed an oil driller.” 

Newt shrugs matter-of-factly as he throws a handful of seeds to the ducks. “Londoners mind their business.” 

-

The next time Minho sees Newt they’re on opposite sides again, Newt tearing apart machinery at a site set up to start mining oil sands and Minho trying to get close enough to stop him. 

(Kind of. If his efforts are a bit lackluster...mining oil sands is _really_ bad for the planet you know.)

“Heads up.” Newt teases. Then he drops a truck on Minho.

But he does it almost gently.

-

“They’ve got this whole thing, I’m telling you dude.” Fry says exasperatedly as Gally and him share a cup of coffee on a misty pier in a tiny fishing village at dawn. 

Fry suppresses a shiver. It’s freezing on this dock.

That’s the weird thing about being able to feel thousands-of-degrees-hot-shit, it always made the cold more _noticeable_. When you’ve held the equivalent of a volcano in your hands, a clammy chill feels like Siberia. 

“So it’s as bad for you guys as it is for us?” Gally asks as he takes a sip from his cup. Neither of them have to worry about catching colds anymore, it's just fond memories of the two of them in puffy winter coats that roll through Fry’s mind. Gally scowls. “They _have_ to figure it out, I can’t take this anyone. I caught him watching old news footage.” 

Fry cracks a grin, looking out at the grey-blue Atlantic Ocean. They’re a long way from their small hometown in California. A ship bell gives soft rhythmic clangs and boats creak gently on the tide. “I’m glad that you guys teamed up. Newt’s alright in my books.” 

Gally scoffs a laugh. “We haven’t ‘teamed up’, we’re just...adjacent. And you’re pretty all about the guy that you tried to arrest last month.” 

“Please. The Director just wants to get him in a room to offer him a job as a plea deal. He’s just gotta stop blowing shit up.” 

Gally gives a reluctant nod of his head. “Newt _kind of_ has a point though Fry.” 

“Oh I never said he didn’t.” Fry says as he takes Gally’s coffee. With absent concentration he reheats the styrofoam cup between his palms until the coffee is steaming again, handing it back to Gally who gives a grunt of appreciation. 

He’s a good friend.

“They _have_ to deal with it soon.” Gally groans. 

Fry shakes his head incredulously before taking a sip of his own coffee. “I’m telling you man. It’s bad for morale.” 

-

So, Egyptian gods? Not an exaggeration. There are _very_ real, _very_ powerful, Egyptian gods and goddesses, and they live on a different planet across the galaxy but sometimes they open a magic doorway through the Nile River to do battle on earth and search for mystical objects of power. 

And Minho’s kinda done with this shit. 

There’s currently a death match going on in the Sahara between a cobra the size of a building and an eagle that’s on par with a jumbo jet, and it’s spilling over into Cairo. Sand’s flying up to form a growing dust cloud, people are screaming, and giant animal-gods are making _seriously_ loud angry sounds that vibrate Minho’s bones. 

It’s just...a _whole_ other thing. 

Some of the gods are kinda fucking _assholes,_ but a few of them are cool. 

There’s one in particular who had appeared in a glowing pillar of shining gold light, walking out like there’s a chorus of trumpets and flutes to sound his arrival, and immediately started to get between the two towering monsters trying to rip each other apart. 

“My name is Wepwawet.” The mystery guy says after he’s thrown into Minho and they both crashland into Thomas, who’d sprinted to try and cushion their fall. “And I am here to apologize for my brothers and sisters.” 

The mystery guy is around Minho’s age, has glowing gold eyes, a solid gold nemes on his head, a smile fit for a pharaoh, and a skinny spindly build clad in patient hospital scrubs. 

He can also apparently turn into a giant jackal-man-werewolf-deal at a whim.

So.

“You're kinda young to be a god.” Thomas pants out, sweat dripping down the side of his face and covered in sand, bleeding only _kinda_ profusely. They’re on the edge of the city where the desert meets the buildings, and Minho’s starting to get just a _tiny_ bit nervous that they might be outgunned once you throw _literal gods_ into the mix. Agnes is flying around ducking and dodging between the eagle and the cobra, blasting them both while Fry and Alby provide ground cover, but it’s frantic fighting, there’s nothing teasing or controlled about their movements. 

Wepwawet, ( _apparently_ ) smiles, gesturing to his own body. “This is a boy who is a descendant of mine. He was in an endless slumber and welcomed me. That is the only way I could have inhabited him.” Wepwawet gestures to Newt, who’s a bit of a distance away currently using a purple tinted smoke force field as a barrier to protect a group of fleeing citizens that Brenda’s leading away. “That priest, with the powers of the heka, is he your ally?”

“It’s complicated.” Minho admits dryly. “Speaking of complicated,” He points to the real life old-school-biker tattoo that’s playing out in front of him, the cobra and eagle both the size of buildings locked in a death match.

Wepwawet’s face hardens. “They have very few weaknesses.” 

“Great.” Thomas sighs. “Any of them within a close vicinity?” 

“Yes.” Something’s happening to Wepwawt’s face, a long shifting of skin and muscle, inky black fur that looks hard as polished stone spreading everywhere. 

(And Minho’s seen some weird shit but...come on.) 

The guy is suddenly eight feet tall and has a jackal's head, and he gives a roar that shakes the ground, a cross between a wolf howl and a football stadium that wavers off into a high pitched snarl. Wepwawet lunges forward, sprinting across the desert and jumping on the cobra’s head and trying to claw its eyes out. 

“So…” Thomas hops from foot to foot lightly, warming up his muscles for the next round as the comm’s explode into surprised curses from their teammates at Wepwawet’s sudden return. 

It’s silent between them for a moment as they watch the battle rage. Their friends flying and fighting and blasting, the giant gods roaring and glowing and snarling. 

It looks just as batshit insane as it sounds.

Minho sighs. “Yeah, I dunno man.” 

They take off towards the fighting, Thomas on the ground and Minho in the air, and Thomas calls up, “In case we all die, I ate your last strawberry poptart.”

-

They don’t all die. 

When the battle’s over they all just kind of stand around in a circle, victorious, exhausted, bruised and dusty. Maybe a little shell-shocked. 

Behind them in the distance like forgotten ruins are the slowly disintegrating bodies of the giant gods, a strange hissing sound like a balloon releasing as flesh turns to sand. 

Minho’s not quite sure what to say. None of them are, until-

“Welp.” Brenda says, stretching out her arms. “Told you we had this covered. Not even _close_ to a hail-mary.” Thomas and Alby are sharing a powerbar as Fry shakes out his hands and laughs at some joke that Alby makes. Teresa a short distance away speaks over the comms to the agent team leaders from the Collective moving through the city doing clean up. 

“Yeah.” Newt breathes out. He’s bleeding from a cut on his lip and his hair is _everywhere_. He was _amazing_ today, he was _unbelievable_ today, all graceful sharp strikes and long sweeping movements and grit teeth as his hands ripped matter apart to reform into his own personal monsters, and Minho has the strongest urge to just go over there and-

“Thank you.” Wepwawet says to them from his spot next to Minho in all his regal godly glory. “I’m sure we’ll meet again.” He closes his eyes and breathes deeply. Brenda quirks an eyebrow. When he opens them again they’re dark brown instead of glowing gold. 

Wepwawet falls _directly_ onto his ass and looks up at Minho in dumbstruck shock, completely unrecognizable in every way except his physical body. “Holy shit.” He says in a _much_ different wavering voice. And then, “Holy _shit,_ you're the Defender. You guys are the-” He looks around, voice getting higher. “Holy shit. I was in a coma. Holy shit. I thought I was dying when I heard him in my head-holy _shit_.”

Minho offers his hand and the guy takes it, getting shakily to his feet again. “What’s your name kid?” Minho asks, because his therapist is the _best_ and taught him it’s good to ground yourself, and if this guy is some kind of godly-jekyll-and-hyde it’s important to validate and acknowledge _both_ of them. 

“Winston.” The guy says, looking around at the rubble and destruction before back at Minho with giant eyes. “He’s still in my head. I can totally feel him. He keeps thanking me.” 

-

When Minho can find the time, he likes to take a day off. 

It’s not an actual day off, because he’s pretty much technically _always_ on call, but it’s nice to get out into the city if it’s raining and he can wear a jacket with a high collar and a baseball cap he can pull down low. 

It’s mostly just to get a bagel and a coffee and window shop a little like a normal person, but as he’s walking back through the sidestreets he notices a book in the window of a secondhand bookstore. 

The bell above his head dings both when he goes in and then comes out again, only this time with a brown paper wrapped shape under his arm. He tells himself it’s just friendly interest, just curiosity. 

When he gets back to the Tower he flies up to the landing pad for the jet instead of going through the ground entrance to avoid the tourist groups, stepping into Agnes’s lab and shaking out his coat. 

Chuck, the weird genius kid that Thomas seems to have some sort of brotherly thing going on with, is standing there with lab goggles strapped to his face and making his curls stick up in every direction. His beam makes his cheeks even rounder and Minho has to suppress the urge to pinch them, and he’s wearing a scientifically accurate shirt of a dinosaur skull with ‘Cretaceous Park’ across the front. He’s pretty sure Chuck also has a super strength thing going on from some kind of animal bite or something. 

Or something. 

“Defender! Hey man!” Chuck puts down his beakers with identical glass clinks and Minho braces, because nobody’s perfect and the kid’s blown up enough things to make Minho cautious. 

“Hey Chuck.” Minho says absently, trying to be inconspicuous about the parcel under his arm. Chuck’s a genius, but at sixteen he’s not the most observant individual. “Making a science fair volcano?”

“Trying to build a bio-thermal dissoluble-” He’s cut off by a _whoosh_ of air and Thomas blurs into focus with a box of pizza, the top of the cardboard stained in delicious smelling grease. 

Minho steals a slice as he makes a quiet retreat, passing by Winston’s half unpacked room, hearing one side of their combined personality bickering coming from Winston. He likes what the guy’s done with the place, but psychologically speaking the concept of having another being living in your head informing you of what protective hieroglyphs you need to paint on the walls is probably a bit of an adjustment.

-

Brenda’s walking to the kitchen for a late night snack to bring back to Agnes’s lab when she notices the light on in the library. She pauses at the door and notices Minho reading there for the first time ever in his life. There’s only the one light shining, a cozy yellow glow from the standing lamb behind the couch he’s lounging lengthwise on. He’s gone out into the city judging by his jeans and sweatshirt. Brenda frowns, leaning against the doorframe. “Why are you suddenly so interested in ye’ ol rural England?

Minho jumps like Brenda’s shocked him, which is his own fault for not listening so Brenda’s not going to feel bad about it. 

“What?” He asks, closing the book with a soft snap of page hitting page. “Why do you say that?” 

She waved a lazy accusing finger at him. “You’ve got a book in your room about countryside Europe in the nineteenth century and you’re currently holding a book on English folklore.

Minho nonchalantly opens the book again with a shrug. “No reason.” And then he looks back up with mild-panic, (adorable) “Wait, do you go into my room when I’m not there?”

Brenda smirks as she starts off down the hall again. “Night.” She hums over her shoulder. 

-

A month later there’s a blaring news report on the flatscreen in the Director’s office, and they all gather around to watch the helicopter footage with crossed arms. 

The chaotic jumble of tumble-wash emotions going on in Minho’s chest as he walks the hall to the Director’s office proves to be founded. 

Because it’s Newt on the screen while news reporters droll on in the voice over, and he’s floating above the ocean, his magic-science-glow lighting the world up. The strange tendrils of magnetic smoke were pushing industrial fishing vessels steadily backwards and a pod of dolphins could be seen fleeing out of the corner of the news shot. 

“Oh my fucking _god_.” Brenda says exasperatedly. Winston coughs like he’s trying to cover a laugh. 

“The man’s a genius.” Teresa adds while readjusting her bun. 

Alby gives a single snort of a laugh and looks at Jorge. “He’s saving dolphins man. We gotta hire this guy. We can’t arrest him, there’d be a riot.” 

‘ _You don’t feel that way about Newt_.’Minho thinks. 

With a thrill of panic Minho realizes that for the first time in his life, he might not be strong enough to hold something back.

-

There’s world ending and then there’s _world ending_ and this is the latter. 

(Because for some reason the world always tries to end in New York.) 

Minho watches in horror for a second, time pausing as he hovers above New York City under siege. Smoke rises in columns from buildings, blast and scorch marks and broken glass everywhere. The main firefight is spilling over into Time Square, and having to juggle protecting and evacuation civilians as _well_ as taking on the threat is proving to be pretty hard when they’re in one of the most densely populated few blocks of the country. 

It’s a battle, but it’s not like any others. 

It’s the fucking robot-cult again, and they’re starting to be a _real_ thorn in Minho’s proverbial side. 

It’s probably got something to do with the strange ultra-powerful mysterious artifacts that Winston keeps talking about. It’s somehow all connected, the gems and the artifacts and Atlantis and the gamma rays, and _all_ of them. (Minho’s surprised there isn’t a unicorn thrown into the mix.)

Now that all the pieces are down it’s easy enough to see the big picture. 

Either way, it’s a battle for the planet, and they’re losing. 

Winston’s voice rings shrilly over the comms. “ _Wepwawet says that we need to close the portal to stop the energy from peaking_!” 

Newt’s shadow-dimension monsters are fighting with the cult-guys and the monsters that’re pouring through the portal they’d opened with the most success out of all of them, but Newt’s only one versus the deep green robed cult’s twenty. 

Minho spots one of the larger monsters crawling below, a thing with eight legs that are a bit like Newt’s creations but somehow different, more sinister, more monstrous, and it’s shaped like a spider _just in case_ there wasn't enough nightmare fuel already.

He hates spiders. 

Minho takes off like a rocket towards it as it turns down a street _filled_ with running people. “What happens if the energy peaks?” He slams into the monster, the two of them rolling on the road, and Minho scrabbles to his feet to just start ducking and dodging and _punching_ the pile of mechanical razor sharp limbs and mashing teeth and _really_ bad breath. 

“ _Nothing good_.” Newt’s voice rings out over the comms just as a blast of smokey purple energy rises above the buildings to the left of where Minho has a snarling spider-metal-nightmare-fuel in a headlock, it’s jaws snapping and chomping and trying it’s best to gnaw off Minho’s face. So Minho just _whips_ it at a chunk of building, spearing the thing on the exposed iron beams twisting off from it.

“Nice throw!” Thomas calls over his shoulder as he zips past Minho, a blur of sight and sound. Winston’s roar _explodes_ from a few blocks west, bouncing off the concrete and the glass skyscrapers. 

Minho looks down at his hands covered in weird gelatinous goopy yellow-green stuff with a twisted mouth. “Urgh.” He wipes his hands on his suit before touching a finger to the comm in his ear. “Newt why would it be bad if the portal energy peaks.” 

“ _Because_ ,” Newt grunts, and he’s clearly juggling one of the spider monsters as well as conjuring his own wolf-shadows. “ _If the portal energy peaks it’ll stabilize, and then we can’t close it_.” 

“Oh that’s not good.” Minho says blandly. 

“ _Nope_.” Alby clips out. “ _It’s not. So we better stop it. Anybody got eyes on the thing?_ ” 

Minho jumps, rising up into the sky like a bullet. It’s not hard to spot a portal into a different dimension on a good day, so it only takes a second before he sees it. “Dead center Time Square.” 

It’s like someone’s ripped a hole in a painting, but the painting is reality, and on the other side is some strange shadowy place that robot spider things with horrible legs keep crawling out of. They’re taking care of the first wave, but another’s probably on its way. The spiders that are giving them so much grief are fast and _awful_ sounding, a strange click-click- _screech_ that grates Minho ears. At the top of the portal the crystal hangs, pulsing and rippling with strange energy, making the hair on the back of Minho’s neck stand up. It’s odd, seeing the fabric of your world hand like tattered paper. And all around the rip are the weird green-robe guys, twenty of them, every last one chanting and making strange motions with their hands. 

It’s not good. 

Teresa flies up beside him and scans the portal, reading off energy findings and spouting science gibberish with Thomas about different ways to close the thing down. 

“ _We could try and blow it up?_ ” Gally offers. 

“ _Wepwawet_ _says not to blow it up_!” 

“ _I can close it. They’re using the same kind of manipulation as me_.” Newt says. 

“No!” Minho snaps. Teresa looks at him sharply but he doesn’t acknowledge it, too busy staring down at the portal and the ten million ways that pale skin could be torn. Alby doesn’t even bother to respond to his angry single syllable. 

“ _Newt you think you can do this_?” 

“Alby _no_ we’re not running this play-” 

“ _Better than Gally at least_.”

“Newt you’re not doing this!” 

“ _Minho…_ ” Newt sighs. Minho swallows. He wishes that there weren’t other ears listening. “ _Min,_ ” He tries again, teasing this time, a single bark of a laugh. “ _Haven’t we all figured out yet that you can’t stop me from doing what I want_?” 

Minho’s silence isn’t a silence, not really, not to Newt. 

But they’d always been good at that, silences saying volumes.

Alby clears his throat. “ _Alright then Newt, we’ll get you there. Flyers, go high. Fry and Brenda go left and I’ll go right with Gally. Thomas and Winston, right up the center and keep em busy until we get there. Then Newt you come in and get this done_.” 

-

Getting thrown through a building hurts. 

Getting thrown through three buildings hurts more. 

He must’ve blacked out, because one minute he’s hitting building number three, and the next minute he’s partially buried in rubble and office supplies on the ground floor of what looks like a travel agency. 

Minho didn’t even know there still _were_ travel agencies. 

He tries to sit up but the world spins. He might have a concussion. He might have hit more than three buildings. 

The sound of panicked footsteps running towards him make a strange echo in his ears. 

Gravel shifts as someone kneels next to him, cradling his face gently, wiping away the soot and dirt while Minho tries to push back against the blackness that’s crowding in his vision. 

His throat is full of something gritty and sharp and Minho turns his head to cough out a huge cloud of dust before squinting up through the bright sunlight at the double-figure that blurs in and out of focus. Every muscle in Minho’s left side screams with each inhale. 

Newt’s faces break into identical terrified relieved smiles, and the two figures shift and focus together with another blink. “You’d think after the tenth time you tried to break a building with your forehead you’dve learned to protect that thick skull. Would it _kill you_ to put your bloody arms up?” 

“It’s my one weakness.” Minho manages to croak out. There’s a _wicked_ headache starting behind his temples, the world still slightly off balance and he can’t really track any of his thought process or impulses, because he reaches up to brush a strand of sweaty blonde hair away from Newt’s cheek. “Are you okay?” 

Newt nods. “Are you?” 

It’s bad. The cult packs a _hell_ of a punch. 

They hadn’t been able to get close, or _stay_ close enough to clear a path for Newt to lay his hands on the hovering glowing gem and shut it down. Between the spider-things and the cult-followers, it’s looking bad. 

_Really_ bad. 

Minho tries to smile. “Hitting buildings with my head is sort of my thing, in case you haven’t noticed.” 

Newt laughs, ragged and afraid. He knows they’re losing too. “It is.” 

And then quite suddenly he leans down and kisses Minho firmly on the lips, blood and all. 

Minho’s sure his supercharged heart straight up _stops_. 

His eyes slip closed, his hand finds its way into Newt’s hair, and for a long lingering second in between the rubble and the dust and the magic and the unbelievable, this one chastise kiss of soft chapped lips feels like the most unbelievable thing of all. 

Newt pulls away slowly, eyes fluttering open. “Okay,” He sighs. “Now I’ve gotta go do my thing.” 

“Newt-“ Minho groans out panicked, but Newt’s already up and running through the hole in the building straight towards the rip in the world, his whole body glowing an incandescent hopeful purple. 

-

It’s bad. 

Brenda knows it’s bad. 

Over half of the team is down for the count. 

Gally’s done, not quite unconscious but injured enough to stay down, (which in Gally terms is saying something) and Fry’s basically huddled over his body blasting anything that comes too close, the sea of portal-monsters and cult robot-worshipers or what-the-fuck-ever just _pouring_ out of the tear in the fabric of reality. 

It’s bad. Brenda knows it’s bad. 

She skids to a stop, watching as Teresa rocket’s down the street overhead, spinning and blasting and generally being the fucking _superhero_ metal arkangel of good that had made Brenda tumble ass over head in love with her. 

(There’s a small sealed envelope in Teresa’s tool box that Brenda will retrieve and put back into her safe when the battle’s over. If she makes it to the end of the battle. If not, then the letter will tell Teresa everything Brenda can’t say right now.) 

The city is a battleground of rubble and the buildings in front of her look like cannons have been shot right through it, and something’s stirring inside. 

With reflexes that could’ve made her an Olympian if life had gone differently, she has a gun in her left hand hand and a stun stick in her other before she can blink. 

But then Minho stumbles out of the wreckage and Brenda’s already moving. Running to his side and sliding his arm around her shoulder as he tries to stumble forward another step. From the way that he’s breathing and holding his side he’s got at least four cracked ribs and Brenda swallows, because if _Minho_ has four cracked ribs they’re in trouble. 

It’s bad. 

This might be some kind of hail mary situation. 

“Newt,” Minho wheezes out, stumbling another step forward towards the center of the potential-hail-mary. Brenda goes with him, because if she doesn’t there’s a good looking chance he’ll fall over. 

“Newt what?” She asks. 

Minho looks at her and she knows. 

Brenda can see the portal three blocks down. There’s a sudden explosion of purple smoke, of strange shaking magic energy. The sounds of Newt’s shadow monsters snarling and fighting with the robots and the cult bounces off the buildings. It’s chaos, an all out bloodbath. There’re more of Newt’s creations than she’d ever seen him manage to conjure at once before. 

Alby’s voice rings out over the coms. “ _Jesus he’s making a run for the portal_. _Anyone left standing cover Newt!_ ” 

A real hail-mary.

Minho makes a strangled choked noise. It sounds like Newt’s name. 

(See, this is why it had always annoyed Brenda whenever anyone called Minho indestructible.) 

-

Winston snaps down with his jaws, the strange monster giving a death scream before going limp. He spits the metal-flesh-spider body out just as a blur shoots past him, and Winston catches the hint of grey that he knows is purple. 

“What the hell is Newt doing?” The words come out snarled and garbled. He’s still getting the hang of the different jaw shape and sharper teeth.

Winston can feel Wepwawet’s sorrow in his head when he answers. 

“ _What he must._ ”

-

One minute Alby’s alone with his bloodline in a sea of awful spider-monsters with too many metal legs, and the next moment an explosion of shadow-dog-shapes washes over him like a tide, tearing down everything in its path but Alby. 

He’d always liked Newt. 

The guy has style.

-

As he sprints through the streets littered with debris towards what’s probably going to kill him, Newt remembers what Yagabaw had said when he’d left the Still Forest Without Time, how she had looked him dead in the eye with all three of her own. 

(“ _You love to fight losing battles little tadpole, even with yourself_.”)

Newt sighs. 

The old crone was always infuriatingly right. 

-

When the crystal explodes in a wall of heat and purple energy that blasts everything in its radius back twenty feet, Minho says Newt’s name.

-

New York heals slowly. 

When the dust settles and the rubble is cleared away, the sounds of construction explode all around the damaged patch of the city. It could’ve been worse, could’ve been a lot worse if…

(His heart aches, the slowest thing to heal on him is the only thing that keeps him human, and isn’t that just the metaphor of the century.)

Anyway.

There’s the clang of metal and the grind of heavy machinery all over. Agnes is basically funding the whole city being rebuilt, and the world seems to be taking a break between catastrophic events considering how much trouble the last one had caused. 

On a particularly bright fall afternoon Minho takes his first day off in three months, and he’s a solitary figure in the sky floating down to Central Park. 

To feed the ducks. 

He floats around in the sky until he finds a part of the park that’s mostly empty, and Minho sits silently with his legs hanging over the edge on the stone guardrail, dropping seeds to the happy flapping birds below. 

It’s been a long three months. 

His ribs had healed by the next day, but they were never going to be the problem.

Newt’s plastered all over the city. In photos, across newspapers, on the screens in Time Square. He’s The Bewilderer, saviour of the planet, after all. Everywhere Minho turns is Newt’s smiling face, intelligent dark brown eyes, his slightly lifted smirk set on an arrogant tilt of head. 

Minho swallows, closing his eyes and pushing back against the rush of emotions, back against everything rising up inside because he _can’t_ believe that this is how it turned out, that this is _it_ , that everything went so-

“There you are.” Says a low voice, a hint of teasing and smooth as silk.

( _Right_.) 

Minho smiles, opens his eyes, and turns. “How’s the unpacking going?” 

“Alright,” Newt sighs. He’s wearing one of Minho’s sweatshirts and plain blue jeans. When he goes to sit next to Minho his movements seem cautious. Probably because he’s still healing after being slammed into a concrete street and breaking almost every bone in his body when he’d managed to destroy the gateway by blowing it up. (Which Gally is still _annoyingly_ smug about.)

So Minho reaches up and helps steady him down, hand lingering on Newt’s shoulder before sliding up to rub at his neck. Newt sighs, leaning against Minho and letting his head fall forward onto his chest. Minho works the still tender muscles with the lightest of pressures for a few quiet seconds, lost in the motion of it, of Newt leaning trustingly against him. Minho’s never felt so simultaneously indestructible and breakable.

When Newt speaks again his words are muffled against his chest. “What’s with all of you and strawberry pop tarts? And there’s a pyromaniac high schooler that keeps blowing things up.” Newt’s voice is teasing, but there’s still a hint of his guard being up. It’s fair, Minho supposes. It must be hard to get attached once you’ve experienced time-travel-related abandonment. 

“Oh, that’s Chuck. He’s a good kid. Agnes is obsessed with your matter-manipulation by the way, I caught her and Thomas whispering over calculations the other night.” 

“Fry is nice. I see why Gally’s so loyal to him.” Newt says, squeezing Minho’s massaging hand before pulling it away. He adds a small kiss on Minho’s palm and Minho feels goosebumps rise on his arms. He didn’t even know his arms still _got_ goosebumps. 

Nothing’s ever done that to him before. 

But, then again, that applies to Newt a lot. 

“Think Gally’s going to follow your lead and join up?” Minho asks, clearing his throat against the tightness. The pond water reflects the sunlight, throwing it back up against Newt’s face and making him look like some kind of mosaic. 

Newt seems to consider the answer deeply, frowning and sprinkling birdseed on the water. “Stranger things have happened.” He looks up, catches Minho’s hungry stare and smiles, a pleased sharp thing. “Speaking of,” Minho can tell from the look on his face what he’s about to do. 

Minho sighs. 

Newt’s eyes flash purple. 

Minho can’t fight his smile, can’t hold back the expression for even a second. 

Newt kisses him. 

And it’s just like flying. 

**Author's Note:**

> this was such a dope way to kill a few hours and I had so much fun mashing and mixing every superhero trope that I love (and throwing a few of my own ideas in as well) I apologize for nothing


End file.
